I don’t want to hurt your reputation, so I’ll do it. But I’m gonna tell you something, Zig. If you ever do this again, then it’s gonna be your neck, it ain’t gonna be mine! I’m not gonna EVER do this again!”
She got out of the car and I don’t know if she slept that night or not. I know I didn’t!
The next night I got one of the most exciting telephone calls I have ever gotten in my life. Came in about nine o’clock. It took me about forty minutes to get that introvert off the telephone. I mean, she, word by word, step by step, blow by blow, gave me minute details in everything that took place.
She said, “When I got to the first family, Zig, they had the coffee made and the dessert on and we had a wonderful time! They told me how personable I was, what a great personality I had and how professional I was! Zig, I had a wonderful time there and three of the six couples had the coffee on and the dessert ready and they all bragged on me. I’m tellin’ you I had the time of my life! I’ll do this any time you want me to do it.”
Didn’t happen that year or the next or the next or the next. But a little less than five years later, Gerry Arrowood was the vice president in charge of sales training internationally for a multi-million-dollar cosmetic company. You know what I believe? I believe with all of my heart there will be tens of thousands of Gerry Arrowoods who will read this book and they will rationalize, accurately so, “If she can do it, I can do it, too!”
Now I’ve got one major regret in this whole episode and that is I did not retain the name and address of the first couple she delivered that set of cookware to. I’m here to tell you that she approached that first home with fear and trembling. She was in a mad dash—she couldn’t wait to get to the second one. It’s amazing what a word of encouragement will do. Somebody once said there are a lot of people who have gone a lot further than they thought they could because somebody else thought they could. That first couple had a profound impact; they are unsung heroes. They really did something for Gerry Arrowood.
Have you ever noticed, normally speaking, that when somebody says, “I’m gonna tell you something for your own good,” then they tell you something bad? Did it ever occur to us that if we’re going to tell somebody something for their own good that we ought to tell them something good for their own good? It’s an old principle. Andrew Carnegie, a hundred years ago, had forth-three millionaires working for him. He was the first great industrialist our society produced. A reporter got wind of it and asked him, “Mr. Carnegie, how on earth did you hire forty-three millionaires?”
Mr. Carnegie said, “Well, none of them were millionaires when I hired them.”
“Then what did you do to develop them to the degree that they became so valuable to you that you could pay them so much money they became millionaires?”
Carnegie taught us a great lesson when he said, “You develop people in the same way you mine gold. When you go into a gold mine you expect to move tons of dirt to get an ounce of gold. But you don’t go in there looking for the dirt; you go in there lookin’ for the gold.”
See, I happen to believe there’s a gold mine inside of everybody we deal with. I believe people have got a great deal more inside of them than they realize. The Gerry Arrowood story—you see, it took an awful lot of courage for her to take that first step. Courage is not the absence of fear; it’s going ahead despite the fear. Shakespeare said, “The applause of a single human being is of great consequence.” When Gerry got that, she liked it so much she started doing other things. She became a student, she started learning, she became excited about growing in life, and when people are growing then they are generally excited. When you are learning things, that’s what creates the excitement. She was a very humble person.
Humility is one of the great qualities of leadership. That doesn’t mean that when a person is humble that they think less of themselves, it simply means they think of themselves less. Over a period of time Gerry’s confidence grew, but it never turned to arrogance. You see, when you get arrogant, that’s when Buster Douglas knocks out Mike Tyson. And for the benefit of those of you who are not fight fans, that’s when Mike was the unbeatable heavyweight champion of the world and Buster Douglas was almost a nobody. They weren’t even betting on it because he was such a prohibitive favorite, and that was the last fight Buster Douglas ever won, right there.
Gerry Arrowood retained her humility; she built her confidence, she worked very, very hard. She became that student. But she took what she had and developed it. That’s one of the reasons I will say so many times to you that you need to listen to your audios over and over. You see, they keep hope alive. When you hear these things in your mind over and over, you’re going to get a lift.
Now, I’m certain that when Gerry Arrowood got out of the car that night to deliver that cookware, she wasn’t thinking, “Well, you know, Zig’s been tellin’ me I can have everything in life I want if I’ll just help enough other people get what they want, and what I want to be is vice president in charge of sales training for that big ol’ cosmetic company, and if I deliver these cookware sets, then I’ll get to be the vice president in charge.” Now, isn’t that insane? She did it because it was the right thing to do. I was in a jam. She felt a loyalty to me and a concern for me as a friend and as her employer. It’s a philosophy I’m talking about. I’m not talking about a tactic.
Now let me ask you a question: How many of you consider yourself to be honest and at least reasonably intelligent? Let me ask you honest and intelligent people a question. How many of you, as a general rule, get more work done on the day before you go on vacation than you normally get done in two, three, even four days? Now, if we can figure out why and how and repeat it every day, without working any harder, does it make sense that you’d be more valuable to yourself, your company, your family and your community? The answer is yes. No question about it. Yes, it does make a whole lot of sense.
So let’s see if we can do a little exploring and find out why, and here’s the first thing: First of all, you’ve already said that you are honest and intelligent. Now, I want to make another profound statement. What you do off the job determines how far you go on the job. Every athlete knows that. Every entertainer knows that. Every public speaker ought to know that. If every other worker, doing anything, would learn that, then they would be getting ahead much faster in life.
They did a study on the typical American plant and the person working the line on an hourly basis watched an average of thirty hours of television a week. The person in charge of that line watched an average of twenty-five hours of television a week. The foreman watched an average of twenty hours of television a week—are you noticing a little trend here? The plant superintendent watched an average of fifteen hours of television a week. The vice president of the plant watched an average of twelve to fifteen hours of television a week. The president watched an average of eight to twelve hours of television a week; the chairman of the board watched an average of four to eight hours of television a week and fifty percent of that time they were watching training videos.
What do you think would happen to that person who’s watching thirty hours of television a week if they were to take ten of those hours and get involved in doing what you’re doing right now; reading good books, attending valuable seminars, getting that education? Is there a chance that they are a victim of circumstances or is it because they are a victim of inertia? It’s easy to go home and sit down in front of the television and let it dominate or run their life. See, the television doesn’t have that much good information. It does some things to you but the biggest damage television does is what it keeps you from doing. It keeps you from talking to folks, keeps you from exercising, keeps you from reading, keeps you from learning, keeps you from associating with other people, developing friendships and a hundred and one other things.
What all this leads up to is, on the night before vacation, how many
